According to the BBC today, Solzhenitsyn “opened the eyes of the world to the evils of Soviet Communism”. No, try again. “He exposed the brutality of the Stalin era.” Much better. By way of contrast, the Socialist Party has held the same, consistent and correct attitude towards Russia since before Aleksander Solzhenitsyn was born!

Searching our website, you could be forgiven for thinking that we have had nothing to say about this world famous author. This is not the case as at present only a only a fraction of our published material going back to our inception in 1904 is available online. The Socialist Standard of January 1972, for example, has a piece titled ‘From a Russian prison camp’:

On 21 April, 2008, President Evo Morales of Bolivia delivered the opening address to the Seventh Session of the U.N. Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues in New York. His speech included the following passage:

“If we want to save the planet earth, to save life and humanity, we have a duty to put an end to the capitalist system. Unless we put an end to the capitalist system, it is impossible to imagine that there will be equality and justice on this planet earth. This is why I believe that it is important to put an end to the exploitation of human beings and to the pillage of natural resources, to put an end to destructive wars for markets and raw materials, to the plundering of energy, particularly fossil fuels, to the excessive consumption of goods and to the accumulation of waste. The capitalist system only allows us to heap up waste. I would like to propose that the trillions of money earmarked for war should be channelled to make good the damage to the environment, to make reparations to the earth.”

Despite the striking anti-capitalist content of most of this passage, the last sentence reveals that Morales does not have a clear conception of the socialist alternative. He still thinks in terms of the money system.

The accurate way of posing the problem focuses not on the waste of money but on the waste of real resources of all kinds – the waste of nature and its bounty, of human life and labour, of knowledge and its potential. True, money represents or symbolizes some – far from all — of these real resources, but in a very inadequate and distorted manner. To substitute the symbol for the reality is a mystification.

“Oblivious of rumours that famine is gathering again and that the state’s food-distribution system is breaking down, the country’s pampered elite went on a shopping spree at the Pyongyang Spring International Trade Fair, held on May 12th-15th. Originally designed to promote business-to-business contacts, the trade fair, along with a companion event in the autumn, has become one of the few opportunities for North Koreans—or, more accurately, a few thousand residents of the capital—to buy, or gawk at, foreign merchandise. More than 100 Chinese companies, together with some from Taiwan, Indonesia, Britain and North Korea itself, offered up everything from T-shirts to heavy machinery. Cutting-edge technology it wasn’t. Duvets, refrigerators, flat-screen televisions, DVD players, cooking pots and cosmetics were the most popular items. More than 15 units of one of the show’s most expensive items, a $1,200 refrigerator from Haier, a Chinese company, were snapped up. Counterfeit iPods were also popular, even if downloading is illegal. North Korea’s new rich make their money from political connections. But one shortage they don’t seem to face is that of American dollars.

(Economist, 29 May)

What might have happened if, forty years ago, workers in France had taken over the factories and tried to keep production going.

1968 saw an outbreak of protest in various parts of the World. Much of it was very violent and the main thrust of this protest was in France and in America, where a longer-term campaign was being pursued. To a lesser extent, again, some of them very violent, demonstrations took place in Germany and in this country.

Ah, Maoists.. They always claim they are more clever than us “arm-chair” types (their term). They are always swimming with the people, or against the current, but never pissing in the pool or skipping down the capitalist road.

And after years of political defeats and military victories, Maoists have taken control of Nepal.

A Critical Look at the Left’s Flirtation with Islamic Fundamentalism
-from Communicating Vessels Magazine Issue 19

“I have striven not to laugh at human actions, nor to hate them, but to understand them.” Baruch Spinoza

THE WORLD HAS undoubtedly changed since the late 1980s. No one can deny that when the Berlin wall crumbled and the bureaucratic socialism of the Soviet Union imploded, the Western world was in a state of jubilant euphoria. You could view images of excited people chipping away at the wall that separated East Germany from West Germany. But in the years following those moments of joy, the market would claim its triumph and sovereignty over social experiment and social transformation.

The freedom of the individual was victorious over the Soviet cult of the collective. Each individual was supposed to fend for himself and not rely on an overarching state to take care of her needs. Expression, once the province of state-sponsored collective realism and agitprop, would now shift hands and be placed into the mitts of an elite concerned with form over meaning and content. Culture was to be a kind of consumption and a style you chose because of the freedom of the individual and the market. There was to be no culture but mass culture bought and sold as an industry.

Editorial from the forthcoming January 2008 issue of the Socialist Standard

This article, aimed at the British Green Party, can be just as easily applied to the Green Party here in the States. Capitalism, no matter how progressive, can never be reformed in the interest of the working class or the planet.

The latest issue of Socialist Worker (25 August) of the Socialist Workers Party (UK) carries an article on the Stuttgart Congress of the Second International which took place a hundred years ago. According to the author, John Riddell, the Congress “took a bold stand in the struggle against capitalist war”. No, it didn’t.

The big set piece debate was on militarism and anti-militarism. Some of the French delegates wanted the Congress, in the words of a motion proposed by Gustave Hervé, “to answer any declaration of war, from whatever side it may come, by military strike and insurrection” (an anticipation of Lenin’s “turn war into a civil war”, though Lenin didn‘t vote for it). This was opposed by August Bebel on behalf of the German party. There were good grounds for opposing it, in particular because if not enough workers were socialist-minded and the representatives of capital still controlled the State it was likely to lead to a bloodbath. But it was not on this ground that Bebel opposed it. Basically, he didn’t want to rule out the possibility of Social Democrats supporting a so-called “defensive” war. Nor was he against a country having armed forces; he just wanted them to be organised democratically as a “citizens army”. So, he wasn’t an “anti-militarist” even in theory.

Terrorism is now associated with Islamic extremists, but in the early 1970s there were terrorist groups on the “far-left.” This article looks at the half-baked “socialist” notions from the New Left that these terrorists took and then burned to a crisp.

Far-left terrorist groups, such as the Weathermen in the United States and the Red Brigades in Italy generally emerged at the tail end of the 1960s with the beginning of the disintegration of the various New Left movements. The
members of these groups acquired some of their ideas, such as they were, from this movement. This is not suggest, of course, that the two sides are identical, which would be as absurd as the right-wingers today who are convinced Islam is inherently terroristic.

“The leadership of Oglaigh na h’Eireann has formally ordered an end to the armed campaign. This will take effect from 4pm this afternoon. All IRA units have been ordered to dump arms” (Extract from IRA statement of 28 July)

So the IRA has given up the gun for the ballot box – but not for the first time.

“We are all Zapatistas” has been painted on banners, walls and shouted at demonstrations in recent years. The slogan has been used by leftists, anarchists, advocates of fair-trade schemes and even for commercial gain. But who are the Zapatistas?

The Zapatistas take their name from Emiliano Zapata who led the Ejército Libertador del Sur (Liberation Army of the South) during the Mexican Revolutionary war from 1910 until his assassination in 1919. During the 30-year dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz which preceded the revolution much of the land farmed by the indigenous people was enclosed to form haciendas or ranches for the production of food for export markets forcing peasants into, both wage- and debt-slavery to the often cruel ranch owners. Zapata’s army sought to institute the Plan of Ayala for the repossession of the haciendas for landless peasants where pre-enclosure legal titles existed and partial expropriation of land, with compensation, where legal titles didn’t exist. The Liberation Army of the South initially fought the federal forces who sought to uphold the dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz. Zapata’s army also fought the constitutionalist forces which eventually replaced Diaz as well as the intervening military dictatorship.

Earlier today, it was announced by the North Korean government that it was in the possession of nuclear weapons. It is thought that this could be a ploy to instill fear in other countries, particularly in the five countries that had been involved in disarmaments talks with N. Korea. One newspaper has been quoted about the situation by calling it “a crisis from hell”. At the same time it is thought that perhaps N. Korea is simply bluffing to gain leverage on the international community. Amidst the announcement, the US continues to reiterate the importance of restarting the 6 nation disarmament talks that N. Korea backed out of.

The ultimate contradiction in this recent announcement is that while the “international community” criticizes N. Korea for its announcement, many of these same countries fully admit to their own possession of nuclear weapons, most of which I do not have to list for you.

A big issue where I live is the rise in housing costs. For some years now, the price of housing in Southern California has been skyrocketing. What is required to buy even a modest home here would buy practical palaces in other parts of the country. Renting isn’t easy either. Poorer neighborhoods are being renovated and replaced with condos, leaving these families with little alternative.

Enter ACORN, a nation wide community group that brings to light the needs of lower and middle-income families. Their position is that low income housing should be made available to lower income families and current housing be left alone so that current families wont be put out by high priced real-estate developers.

The following is a posting from the Anarchist Infoshop website. It deals with the financial set-up of the Trotskyist International Socialist Organization (ISO).

We feel it is important that radicals understand why the backroom financial dealings within pseudo-socialist organizations such as the International Socialist Organization (ISO) as anti-working class.

From Dave Perrin’s history of our companion party in the UK. the development of the WSPUS’ thinking developed on identical lines:

The World’s First Socialist Revolution?